This is my writing and pictures from the project I submitted to the Holocaust Educational Trust after my visit with them to Auschwitz in March 2007:

AUSCHWITZ AND ME

Hello, I’m Alison. When you look at me, what do you see? I’m in my forties now, a teacher, and I have my own story, of course. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at the story of Auschwitz. That story affected so many millions of people, human beings like you or me. But Auschwitz is not over. It’s in front of us all the time, or appearing over our shoulders, arising surreptitiously where we do not see it. So we have to be on our guard, because Auschwitz has a place in our own stories too. Here’s how it has a place in mine:

I was born in 1962, and when I was 6, my family moved from Essex to North East London. I had not long started primary school near our new home when a black girl joined our class. I think she was from Jamaica. My mother had made me a special coverall for art lessons. It was green with a daisy print pattern. It was different from everybody else’s plain overalls and I treasured it very much. One day, I was told, the newcomer had found it on my hook and worn it for her own art lesson. My fellow pupils found it funny that she was wearing it the wrong way round, buttoned at the back! I saw this when my friends pointed her out to me. I felt sympathy for the stranger in our midst because she was a bit different. I said nothing; later I found the coverall returned to the peg. I felt good about it – she had used something that was mine, but she didn’t know that.  I had accepted her and had not made her feel unwelcome.

In the mid-seventies, our neighbours moved to Australia when that country’s ‘White Australia Policy’ was encouraging migrant labour from the UK. Our new neighbours were black – well the husband was white and his wife was from Guyana and they had mixed-race children. Our elderly neighbour on the other side said it was a shame. I was very upset indeed by that reaction.

MY EXPERIENCE OF JUDAISM

Five years of my secondary education were spent at the City of London School for Girls. About one quarter of the school were Jewish.

 My mother died of cancer during the summer holidays before my last year at the school. One of my Jewish friends wrote me a letter of condolence, writing ‘G-d’, instead of ‘God’. I think I was told that Jews did not write God’s name in full. I later learned that if a Jew writes the name of ‘God’ out in full, the piece of paper can never be thrown away.

 But now I’ve been studying the subject of the Holocaust closely, it made me think: there were children who never even knew their mothers, or became alienated from them when they were saved by the ‘Kindertransport’.

Since I went to Auschwitz, I saw a play called ‘Kindertransport’ by Diane Samuels, about a Jewish girl who was sent to England as a young girl and grew into an adult with an English mother. After the war, her real mother had survived and came looking for her. But she did not recognise her any more and wanted to bury the past with a new identity. The pain of being without a mother during adolescence is something I understand.  When we were at Auschwitz, we were told the story of David, whose mother pushed him away from her several times during the selection to ensure that he joined the group that would have a chance of surviving. Not understanding this final act of maternal love, David the adolescent turned round to her, saying he hated her and wished her dead. That is the last David saw of his mother How many times, as we grow up, are we thoughtless to our parents in what we say. Most of us don’t have to live with those words being the last we spoke to them.

 I now live in the Medway towns, an area with an historic synagogue. The modern stained glass windows bear the names of all the concentration camps. Here are two pictures of them*:

But only two weeks after my return from Auschwitz, I saw a piece of graffiti in a subway near Rochester Bridge. I happened to have my camera with me, so I took a picture of it. It shows how anti-Semitism is still with us.

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I went to university and studied Chinese and German. At the age of 19 I spent one academic year in Shanghai, part of which was occupied in the 1930s by the British. I was told there had been a sign above the entrance to one of the parks: ‘No Dogs or Chinese’.

Even as I grew up, there was another example of a country where the natives were treated as second- class citizens using the full force of the law: South Africa. 

In the late eighties, I was very involved in the anti-apartheid movement. In June 1988, I attended the 75^th birthday celebration of anti-apartheid campaigner Rev. Trevor Huddleston in London. He stood there and said “Apartheid must die before I do!” At the time, there was no sign of this happening. But history shows that only the following year, President de Klerk came to power and two years later, Nelson Mandela was released! This shows what a man of vision Huddleston was – he lived on to see the dismantling of apartheid, finally dying in 1998.

As someone who has studied the German language and culture, one thing that strikes me about the Nazi era is the way Hitler managed to mesmerise the German people en masse. This leads us to consider the actions of the perpetrators. I found the following quote in a book called ‘KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS’:

“During the spring of 1942 hundreds of vigorous men and women walked all unsuspecting to their death in the gas chambers, under the blossom-laden fruit trees of the “Cottage” Orchard. This picture of death in the midst of life remains with me to this day”.

(Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, from his accounts written after the war).

The following is dedicated to those who defied Auschwitz by playing football in the face of death or singing their National Anthem just before they were shot:

WILL WE EVER LEARN?

How long do we have to remember Auschwitz?

So long as there is Rosa Parks and Martin Luther-King

So long as there is Apartheid

So long as there are the Killing Fields of Cambodia

So long as there is Rwanda

So long as indigenous peoples are treated unfairly

So long as there is the Balkans

So long as there is Northern Ireland

So long as there is Stephen Lawrence

So long as there is conflict anywhere in the world

So long as there is Darfur…

So long as there is the bully in the playground.

Where does it all start?

With you and me, if we don’t stand up against it.

SOME MEMORIES OF THE DAY WE WENT TO AUSCHWITZ

We went first to the town of Oswiecim. This is the Polish name for Auschwitz. We went to the Jewish Cemetery. Before the war, there was a thriving Jewish community here. We went to see that people died here and were given a burial according to their faith, using their names and a language which defined their identity.

. Auschwitz would deprive them of their names, giving them a number. Customary rituals associated with death and mourning were no longer possible such was the scale of the massacre at Auschwitz where so many millions died.

I remember going to Block 11, where political prisoners were sentenced and put to death. It was cold and damp – we saw the cells, the offices and the places of torture. For a second, I sensed a whiff of something indescribable at my nostrils – air tinged with oppression.

I took a couple of pictures of the suitcases+ ; on one, I was struck by the name ‘Kafka’ – the surname of Franz Kafka, the Austrian Jew whose works I read in German during my university course. 

The other bore the word ‘Apotheke’, or ‘Chemist’ – it belonged to someone who had dedicated themselves to helping people to recover from an illness, or even to saving lives, The suitcases also reminded me of the story of ‘Hana’s Suitcase’ by Karen Levine, which tells the story of a suitcase from Auschwitz which found its way to Japan and the quest to track its owner – a young girl who did not survive. 

Round the corner from sentry box, the orchestra used to play to accompany the day-to-day running of the camp. Even music was regulated here, and made to serve the purpose of Auschwitz.

The barracks or stables were designed for 52 horses, but 400 or more prisoners were packed in

In 1944, the genocide of the Jews was stepped up. It is as if the Nazis knew they would lose the war and needed to prove that they could succeed at something – the destruction of a people they purported to despise.

Before we left Auschwitz, we were told to focus on one picture out of those on display, showing the victims. This was so that, in the midst of the massive numbers, we could realise that there were individual human tragedies in this story. I finished up focusing on two. One was of a young woman with a determined and joyful look, indicating a smiling vision of the future. I realised her dreams had been destroyed. This reminded me that I was once a young woman like that - one who struggled hard because of losing my mother so young  – but my own life had not been so curtailed and I could still look forward. The other picture was of a woman talking caringly to her daughter. This represents my present, as I now have my own teenage daughter and my family life is the source of so much joy. Thank God that we live in peace and that I could leave Auschwitz the day of my visit to return to her. But I must never be complacent. My daughter is mixed race – she is half Ghanaian.

So when you see my picture – think again…do you see only a middle-classed white woman…and assume a lot…without knowing anything about my life, do you stereotype me too?

This year, I saw the film ‘Freedom Writers’ based on a true story of racism in 1990s Los Angeles where the white teacher of a racially diverse group of teenagers encourage them to write their own diaries, drawing heavily on the example of Anne Frank. The young people learn all about Anne and the Holocaust, showing the lasting relevance of such lessons.

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I’m a big fan of the rock group Queen. In 1994, the group’s drummer, Roger Taylor, wrote and  recorded a song for his solo album ‘Happiness’ about Neo Nazis and Holocaust Denial called ‘Nazis 1994’ Here are the lyrics:

They’re saying now it never happened

They’re saying now it never happened

They’re saying now it never happened

They’re saying now it never happened

We gotta stop these stinking Nazis

And they say that it didn’t happen

What the Nazis did to the Jews

If they think they’ve a second coming

Then we got different news

We gotta stop these stinking Nazis

They say now it didn’t happen

They say now it didn’t happen

They say now it didn’t happen

They say now it didn’t happen

We gotta stop these stinking Nazis

What the world needs is more Nazis

Like it needs a hole in the head

Your future is not safe at all

‘Til this disease is dead

They’re saying now it never happened

They’re saying now it never happened

They’re saying now it never happened

They’re saying now it never happened

We gotta stop these stinking Nazis

In 2002, Queen’s guitarist Brian May played on a track penned by American singer/songwriter Lynn Carey Saylor called ‘If We Believe’, which is about racism. The song appears on Lynn’s debut album ‘You Like It Clean’. Here are the lyrics:

I believe it’s in each one of us to see

The good that’s in another

Blind to their skin color

Can’t you see there’s just

Two kind of sould around

The ones who hate

And the ones who love each other

It’s our fate

Free will to choose an answer

Why can’t we get along together?

It’s not so hard to see that

(Chorus)

If we believe

We’re not all the same

There’s a hole in our hearts

And nothing at all to gain

But if we believe

We’re only daughters and sons

God’s will is done

I believe it’s wrong

To judge a book upon

The picture of its cover

You need what is under

I have heard some people say

We’re not the same

As each other

But we bleed the same color

It grows late, we need a sane solution

To violence, hat

And all the persecution

It’s not so hard to see that

(Repeat Chorus)

Why don’t we know

There is so much to lose

Get on the streets

And spread the news

(Repeat Chorus)

June 2007

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Addendum (not in original project): 

* 01 Oct 05  I  went to visit the synagogue in Chatham on Sunday. It is a very attractive building with an interesting history:

 Apart from the pictures of the inside and outside, I took a couple of pictures of a very recent stained glass window, in the shape of the sun (see project above), bearing the names of concentration camps of World War II. ‘Nevermore’ must we see that – see 'Nazis 1994'.  

+ The story of another suitcase can be found here.